on Fehr

So Donald Fehr is retiring after this baseball season.  Fehr was the man in charge of the Major League Baseball Player’s Association for a 26 years.  A Mr. Howard Bryant defends Fehr here, singing his praises.

Um…here’s the thing.  Bryant just glosses over one of the biggest issues of Fehr’s reign: his treatment of performance enhancing drugs (heretofore PEDs, aka “steroids”, simplistically).  Bryant basically says he stood tall, and he looked good in front of Congress while Selig didn’t.

One of the main ideas of the column is in this quote:

But if Don Fehr is on your side, you are tremendously better off for it. He does his job, which is to protect the interests of his players; and he has done it exceedingly well at a time of great assault against American unionism in general.

..and maybe, most of the time, that’s true.  However, I think there’s a semantic difference between what Bryant says Fehr is good at and what Fehr’s job calls/called for him to strive for.  Fehr is to work in the best interest of his players, and since sometimes, the best interests of the majority of the players will fly in the face of the best interests of a few of the players.  When possible, Fehr should seek to appease both, but that’s not always possible.  The PED issue is one such scenario: despite Bryant’s argument from relativity that baseball was in the same boat as other pro sports leagues, he isn’t excused from doing the right thing just because it goes beyond the status quo.

What Fehr should have done is protected the interest of the majority (here, probably somewhere between 90-95%) of players by pushing MLB for stringent drug testing.  First, it’s the right thing to do, and second, it would have garnered some goodwill for the union, who is usually viewed as greedy and loathsome when the MLB and MLBPA lock horns (despite the fact that such conflicts usually don’t reveal either side to smell like roses – both teams and players are looking out for themselves, typically, thus both appear greedy.  Exceptions occur when they’re fighting for increased retirement benefits right now, because, especially in football, such benefits are embarassingly slim, but I digress…).

But Fehr did not work for those 90-95%; he “protected” the minority, a minority which in some cases was violating federal laws.  The ripple effect here was that basically every player, and especially those who were successful, was viewed with suspicion.  It’s certainly not what Fehr desired, but it was the predictable outcome of turning a blind eye to PEDs.  Despite all the intelligence Bryant talks up in the article, Fehr turned in a disappointing performance on the issue his era of baseball will largely be remembered for, and that’s unacceptable.

*[note: obviously, some in the newsmedia basically treated PEDs like some sort of national tragedy, but considering that the same people say incredibly dumb things like "if you're not cheating, you're not trying," and write books with apparently tons of very, very questionable information and sources, it is incredibly hypocritical and largely driven by page view hunger, misunderstanding the actual issues, inciting debate, etc.  This press, it seems, did not hurt MLB very much, given its ever-increasing popularity, but did hurt the players.  Fehr also might have preempted that had he pushed for PED testing in, say, 2000 or something.]